The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?
Ancient peoples used to sacrifice their livestock–and sometimes their firstborn–to stimulate fertility. Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby and The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? revolve around the slaughter of an animal or an infant, but the murders in these plays are meant to help the characters–and the audience–confront emotional sterility and spiritual emptiness. Both works enact rituals of death and rebirth in which comfortable marriages are exposed as shams and the partners are forced to reinvent their lives. The bloody slaying of a goat and the symbolic destruction of a child are meant to make each spouse realize that he or she is essentially alone and that self-knowledge is the only path to truth.
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The Goat, which premiered on Broadway last year, centers on an architect named Martin (Patrick Clear)–a “decent, liberal, right-thinking, talented, famous, gentle man,” in the words of his elegant and beautiful wife, Stevie (Barbara Robertson). Theirs is a seemingly perfect modern urban marriage: they love each other, are good together in bed, and live in a beautifully furnished home packed with tasteful primitive art and ultramodern furniture (courtesy of set designer Michael Philippi). They’re so au courant they even have a handsome, well-adjusted gay son (Michael Stahl-David) whose homosexuality they accept without reservation. (In this they’re decidedly unlike Albee’s own adoptive parents, whom he satirized in the castrating mother and father figures of Virginia Woolf and its predecessors, The Sandbox and The American Dream.)
The rest of this 100-minute one-act is devoted to the reaction of Martin’s family to his relationship with Sylvia. Stevie unleashes revulsion and murderous anger in a blistering, pottery-smashing, furniture-throwing tirade that matches anything in Virginia Woolf. But while in Virginia Woolf it’s the husband who takes action to exorcise the demons in the marriage, here it’s the wife–who kills, hoping to save her marriage from Martin’s fantasy that he can form an emotional bond with a farm animal.
Next door, in the 365-seat Owen Bruner Goodman Theatre, the stage is bare except for a couple of plain wooden chairs and an oversize baby carriage hanging overhead. Here, in The Play About the Baby (which premiered in London in 1998 and ran in New York in 2001), two couples clash over truth, illusion, identity, and a child who may or may not exist. The younger pair, identified as Boy and Girl (Scott Antonucci and Julie Granata), recall Nick and Honey, the handsome young teacher and his mousy wife in Virginia Woolf whom the bitter alcoholics George and Martha invite over for a game of Get the Guests. Nick and Honey had gotten married because Honey thought–or pretended–she was pregnant. In The Play About the Baby, Boy and Girl seem to be proud first-time parents: in the first scene, she rushes offstage to undergo a loud delivery, climaxed by the cry of a child.
